Of course, so did the family of murder victim Daniel Nickel. They left out the part about him facing sex charges. Now innocent people have faced trumped up sexual assault charges before (even recently in Northern Alberta), just as innocent people have been killed. But add the two together, and the coincidences just keep mounting.

Two weeks before he died, Niko was kicked out of a party and that night mentioned on his Facebook how he wanted to assault the bouncer. Just angry words, perhaps. But then we learn that some of the other knife assault victims were in trouble for violent behaviour and death threats sometime in early December.

Why, a few months ago, when there was a fight that involved a certain student, his father and weapons against Niko, wasn't more done?

Why did so many students get suspended for three days for watching, but that student got to return to school? He wasn't expelled.

Wait, Niko was involved in a weapons-related incident a few months ago as well? Do we know why? Again, innocent people are occasionally attacked by psychos angry about irrelevent bits of minutia. But twice?

It looks like there's a couple of warring cliques at St. Joseph's High School. If they haven't already descended into gangs, they likely will.

2011-01-24

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So Harper scored a "big win" last night, which I suppose on November 28th I would have agreed with. However, the election wasn't on November 28th, and the early-January swell of Conservative support leaves this result a little empty.

As a decided "glass half-empty" guy (hint to future readers, I'll do a post on that idiom someday soon), I found the negatives in the big Harper win:

The Edmonton Journal did a bad typesetting job on the front page today. I go to the front door, grab the paper without looking at it, bring it in, lay it open face up on my bed, close my eyes, lie down so my face is right there, open my eyes, and see this headline: HARPER HUMBLES GRITS. So naturally, of course, I'm thinking a huge win. It takes a good 30 seconds of searching to find the seat totals above the headline. So then I see 124 Conservative seats, rather than say 158 or some such thing, and its automatically a disappointment.

Toronta and Mount Royal duck the big blue wave. This is bad, really really bad, and yet I'm not entirely sure why. But mark my words, some political hay will be made by Harper's failure to make a dent in Canada's two most pretentious cities.

"Alberta would be a better place if Todd Babiak was premier and Ralph Klein, you know, wasn't." said a venter in today's Journal. Goddammit, the federal election is barely over and now you socialist idiots are trying to ruin provincial politics too??

I also made a few comments that seem to have not held up much in hindsight. Remember when Rahim Jaffer wasn't a laughing stock but a respected member of the "old-guard"?

The Conservatives have swept Alberta. Ann McLellan is gone. Rahim Jaffer (take that, anonymous poster from 5 days ago!) is still firmly in place. The Liberals and their ilk can no longer claim to be a "national party". If the Conservatives can be faulted for not being present in PEI then the Liberals should be acknowledged as the party that nobody in Alberta is willing to tolerate.

So, uh, Ignatieff didn't become Liberal leader and the Conservatives won the following election eh? At least the bit about watered down proposals and no democratic or economic reforms from Harper the nouveau-liberal held up.

Ezra Levant last night apparently bragged to the east about how Alberta seperatism has been stopped with a Harper win. Only he didn't win. And I'll guarantee you that next election he'll lose. Ignatieff will run his own flawless campaign, the media jackals will turn on Harper, and we'll be back where we started. Watered down proposals, promising to back off on all the legislation that needs to be passed, forgoing important democratic and economic reforms, and for what? For 16 months in a cushy house with a shitty lawn in a god-forsaken useless city on the banks of a dirty river. No thanks, just give me my own country.

I mentioned something about coalitions. Well, that was a waste of space wasn't it, since the subject never came up again!

So if you drink 2.6 larges from Tims in a day, that translates to 949 cups of coffee a year. Now lets say you stick to double-doubles. How many calories could you cut back in a day/year if you went to a single-single?

For that, let's turn to the Tim Horton's nutritional calculator: your large double-double contains 230 calories (and 12 grams of fat). That means every day your coffee represents 598 calories and 31.2 grams of fat. Over a year, you've consumed 218,270 calories and 11,388 grams of fat. These numbers look scary, but remember the timeframe.

Now say you decide just to go to a single-single: your coffee is now 115 calories with 6 grams of fat. Now every day you enjoy (and save) 299 calories and 15.6 grams of fat. You consumed (and saved) 109,135 calories and 5694 grams of fat over the year.

That's a pretty good savings. Now let's go to McDonalds to reward ourselves! There are 550 calories in the Sausage/Egg/Cheese McGriddle. Get that shocked look off your face! Thanks to your coffee savings, you can eat 198 of these a year without going over your ol' double-double calorie count. If you stick to only 189 you won't overdo your old fat content either. If you wait until lunch, you can safely eat 196 Big Macs without overloading on fat (or 202 if you only worry about calories).

This also assumes that before you weren't having breakfast or lunch! In reality what this is saying is you can add the equivalent of 3.77 Big Macs per calendar week to your lunch menu and, as long as you stick to single-single coffees every day, you won't consume a single extra microjoule of energy (or microgram of fat).

2011-01-13

Roughly 75 billion newspapers today have started carrying variations of this story from the Globe and Mail:Why your zodiac sign might have changed. Lots of ink so far has been spilled about the "new horoscopes" and the "extra zodiac sign". Here's a typically inaccurate story by NECN in Boston:

It's one of the things people ask -- "what's your sign"? Astronomers say because the earth's alignment is different from where it was three thousand years ago when the study of astrology began -- the Zodiac signs are different.

New reports out from the Minnesota Planetarium society say the stars' alignment was pushed by about a month, because of the moon's gravitational pull on the earth.

In fact, there's now a 13th sign.

The new dates for Capricorn are January 20th through February 16th.For Aquarius, it's February 16th through March 11th.Pisces: March 11th through April 18th.Aries: April 18th through May 13th.Taurus: May 13th through June 21st.Gemini: June 21st through July 20th.Cancer: July 20th through August 10th.Leo: August 10th through September 16th.Virgo: September 16th through October 30th.Libra: October 30th through November 23rd.Scorpio: November 23rd through November 29th.

The new sign, Ophiuchus is for people with birth dates between November 29th and December 17th.

Sagittarius is now December 17th through January 20th.

Of course, when you start examining other articles you start finding out that when they talk about astronomers they are actually talking about a single guy named Parke Kunkle (who, admittedly, is possibly an astronomer). Who, you might wonder, are the Minnesota Planetarium society? The legal owners of the zodiac? No, in fact, they're a bunch of folks in Minnesota trying to raise money to build a planetarium. This certainly wouldn't be a shameless attempt to get media coverage, would it?

Probably the funniest reaction to this story has been people upset they now have the wrong tattoo on their flesh. If you're dumb enough to put a symbol claiming your personality is set based on what time of year you were born, you really have no right to bitch if we randomly decide to move them all around.

2011-01-12

While Moffett's internet profile seems nonexistant, if you google image search for his name and "edmonton", you get this picture as the first image:With no photos of the suspect so far available, the question remains: is this the man who killed Arlia?

Update, January 30 2011, 6:53pm: With this blogpost gaining increased interest, note that the comment thread covers a lot of territory about the "real" Niko Arlia hinted at in the Facebook screenshot shown above.